Grade: B

The Hateful Eight: Fun and Fury in the Old West

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

The Hateful Eight is silly, self-indulgent, overlong, and obscenely ostentatious. It is also funny, bracing, suspenseful, and supremely entertaining. It is, in other words, a film by Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s poet laureate of grisly violence and savory dialogue. This is the kind of happily ridiculous movie where the no-good woman spends the entire second half with her face covered in blood, and where the manly men seem to have engaged in a mustache-growing contest. As a writerly work of fiction, The Hateful Eight is difficult to take seriously. As a thrilling piece of pulp art, it is impossible to dismiss.

That is especially true for cinephiles. The world’s most celebrated former video-store clerk, Tarantino can be exasperating in his nerdy superiority, his compulsion to constantly remind you of the scope of his encyclopedic knowledge of film’s annals. But he possesses real love for the movies, and The Hateful Eight—which, as the opening title card gratuitously announces, is the eighth picture of his career—is his most pronounced valentine to the form yet. Shot in the fossilized format of 65-millimeter film, its languorous opening scenes—featuring painterly images of a stagecoach striving against the snow of a Wyoming blizzard (shooting took place in Colorado), and of a cloaked man with his head bowed against the cold—beautifully capture the visual majesty of the medium. (Most theaters with digital projectors are showing The Hateful Eight in a slightly truncated version, but a “traveling roadshow” is exhibiting the film in select areas in 70mm, complete with an overture, intermission, and a few extended scenes.) Tarantino’s screenplays may go overboard with their insouciant humor, but in these striking early scenes (shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), he makes clear that his craft is not a joke. To him, movies still matter. Read More

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Crimson Peak: A Haunted House, Bleeding and Beautiful

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska enters a haunted house in Guillermo del Toro's "Crimson Peak"

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a frivolous, ravishing movie that invites a referendum on the very pleasures of moviegoing. This frustrating and satisfying film, which del Toro directed from a script he wrote with Matthew Robbins, is destined to divide audiences, not because it will elicit disputes over its quality, but because appreciation of it hinges entirely on the vagaries of subjective taste. Narrative purists who prioritize plotting and screenwriting above all else will doubtless be vexed by the clumsiness of its dialogue and the banality of its story. Formalists, however, will take rapture in its splendorous visuals and in the lush refinement of del Toro’s craft. It is, in binary terms, either a terrible good movie or a magnificent bad movie.

Let’s begin with the bad. From a storytelling standpoint, Crimson Peak is disappointingly rote, if not entirely dull. Set aside its fantastical prologue—in which a child is visited by the ghost of her newly dead mother, a black phantasm with spindly fingers who whispers gravely, “Beware of Crimson Peak”—and you might mistake it for a lavish period costume drama (if admittedly the first costume drama ever to take place in Buffalo). The year is 1891, and the object of attraction is the amusingly named Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska, persuasive as ever), the peculiar daughter of a pompous aristocrat, Carter (Deadwood‘s Jim Beaver). Edith is a bit like Cinderella without the wicked stepsiblings; she is mocked by the gentry for her oddness, even though she does draw the admiration of a handsome doctor (Charlie Hunnam, who headlined del Toro’s Pacific Rim). A classic Jane Austen heroine, Edith is unlucky in love but spirited in life, and she brazenly channels her energy into the masculine pursuit of fiction writing. Read More

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The Walk: Race to the Top, But Don’t Look Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Gordon-Levitt defies death as Philippe Petit in "The Walk"

Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk tells the story of Philippe Petit, the French daredevil who one day in August 1974, to the surprise and delight of thousands of unsuspecting New Yorkers, tiptoed back and forth across a wire stretching between the roofs of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Midway through the film, Philippe and two confederates slink into a Manhattan electronics store and ask to purchase an interphone. The proprietor, a sharp fellow named J.P., suggests they buy a walkie-talkie instead, but Philippe refuses, explaining to his comrade in rapid French that cops can listen in on walkie-talkies. This statement raises the eyebrows of J.P., who it turns out speaks French (his initials stand for Jean-Pierre, and he is played very well by the American actor James Badge Dale); he assumes that this motley crew is intent on robbing a bank, and that they’re in dire need of some help.

Strictly speaking, J.P. is wrong—Philippe has no plans to steal anything, except perhaps a few moments of immortality. But in cinematic terms, J.P. is on the mark. The Walk, in its elemental form, is a crime caper. Its story, which it tells with considerable glee and marginal distinction, is that of a gang of lawbreakers who conspire to evade police detection and carry out a seemingly impossible objective. In this way, it is a successor to classic heist pictures like Rififi and Ocean’s Eleven. What distinguishes this one is that, where most capers thrive on the planning of the crime rather than the actual execution, The Walk achieves its power in depicting Philippe’s improbable, death-defying triumph. For the majority of its runtime, it’s a fun, frothy film: nicely acted, convincingly staged, and thoroughly familiar. Then Philippe steps out on that wire, and this modest, unmemorable movie becomes unforgettable. Read More

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The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Super-Spy Shuffle, with a Smile and a Wink

Jeremy BeckReviews
Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, and Henry Cavill are charming spies in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

It is telling that the best scene in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Guy Ritchie’s fun and frivolous update of a forgotten ’60s spy show, involves a man quietly helping himself to a sandwich. That would be Napoleon Solo (Man of Steel‘s Henry Cavill), a crack thief-turned CIA agent who, during the scene in question, finds himself fleeing from angry German sentries after breaking into a heavily guarded warehouse. He begins the sequence—along with his grudging partner, KGB operative Illya Kuryakin (The Social Network‘s Armie Hammer)—attempting to outmaneuver ‘ze Germans on a speedboat, but during the chaos, he gets thrown overboard. Any reasonable movie would keep the focus on Kuryakin, hurtling alongside him as he evades his pursuers through heroism and ingenuity. Instead, Ritchie stays with Solo as he calmly finds his way to a pickup truck, where he happily discovers a Little Red Riding Hood-like basket of goodies. As Solo uncorks a bottle of wine and carefully tucks in a bib, the boat chase featuring Kuryakin rages on in the background, orange flames silently erupting into the black night sky. Yet only after savoring a bite of his stolen sandwich, then emitting a weary sigh of annoyance, does Solo come to his partner’s aid.

This is a very funny scene, but it’s also illustrative of Ritchie’s commitment to lightness as a mode of storytelling. To say he favors style over substance almost gives him too much credit. What really matters to him is buoyancy, which is why The Man from U.N.C.L.E. floats along in a state of perpetual ease and winking insouciance. Evoking a James Bond picture from the Roger Moore era (there is even a spectacularly cheesy double entendre), it is difficult to imagine a spy film less interested in generating danger or suspense. It’s pointless, but at the same time, it persuasively suggests that having a point is overrated. Read More

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl: Hungering for Sex, Love, and Womanhood

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bel Powley gives a breakthrough performance in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"

The very first line of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s uneven, appealing coming-of-age story, is “I had sex today”; it is immediately followed by a very Fifty Shades of Grey-like exclamation, “Holy shit!” But despite her youth and initial lack of worldliness, Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) is no Anastasia Steele. She is not timid, nor is she entranced by notions of masculine dominance. She is instead a confident, eager, and often foolish femme who does not apologize for her desires, even if she does not entirely understand them. “I like sex,” Minnie tells us early on, and in case you didn’t believe her, she clarifies, “I really like getting fucked!” That may strike some as vulgar, but the most satisfying thing about The Diary of a Teenage Girl—beyond the powerful performance at its center—is its frankness in discussing sexual desire and its attendant emotions. Minnie is the hero of her story, she wants sex, and she refuses to cast herself as the victim.

Though she is very much that, at least in one sense. Minnie, as you may have gleaned from the film’s title, is a teenager—fifteen, to be precise. That’s young enough as it is, but it becomes alarmingly so once you learn that the person she is so happily, repeatedly tumbling into bed with is her mother’s thirtysomething boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Yet Heller, who also wrote the screenplay (adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel), is not interested in the legal or moral ramifications of Minnie and Monroe’s illicit union. She is more concerned with exploring how it makes Minnie feel: how it affects her sense of self, her demeanor, and, most distressingly, her relationship with her mother (a very good Kristen Wiig). In so doing, Heller puts a tremendous amount of weight on Powley, a 23-year-old British actress appearing in her first American feature (the movie takes place in 1970s San Francisco). She shoulders the load with aplomb, capturing Minnie’s vitality and hunger while also revealing glimmers of her fragility. Read More

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